If you only have 3 servers in the farm, and one of those is a SQL server, you're going to get the most bang for your buck by setting up the two WFEs as load balanced so you achive some semblance of high availability (HA).
The other thing you want to do is when running PSCONFIG for the first time is to make sure both of your WFEs host the Central Admin, for the exact same reason that you want to have HA as much as possible and if you only host it on one server then whe it
goes down you lose your CA as well.
Finally, if at all possible, get another SQL server for a clustered node if you can - redundancy is a wonderful thing. OR - even better if you have 2 datacenters available run 1 WFE in each datacenter, your prod DB in one DC w/ a mirrored DB in the
other and go for a stretched farm approach - pretty much bulletproof, but it gets expensive.
I would not worry about breaking out the Application Services from the WFEs unless for some reason things like Excel Serivices and other BI information is being heavily utilized by the company. We mainly use ours for collaboration and file storage
and despite the heavy improvements in SP BI I still haven't convinced the business to give powerpivot a serious try yet....
